A solopreneur is defined as somebody who is developing their own personal brand.

They are creators and inventors(1), carving out a niche for themselves within their chosen marketplace. Solopreneurs single-handedly seek out the best opportunities. They live and breathe networking – always thirsty for game-changing opportunities.

Social media is their best friend.

The term solopreneur rose to prominence in 2010 through its use as a Twitter hashtag (2). Since then solopreneur has gained BuzzWord status and has been officially archived online in the Macmillan Dictionary(3). Solopreneur nestles chronologically alongside “zenware” and “vape”, with “kimchi” and “hipster” not far behind(4).

The works in this show are disobedient and not necessarily complicit

They raise questions about trust, authenticity and fakery

They react to the glossy, slick, frictionless worlds that screens have created

Women run, float, and appear suspended mid-action amidst dramatic swathes of colour – blue, teal, pink and gold. Classical features and smooth marble-like skin are draped in fold upon luscious fold of silken fabric. We, the viewer, feel we are intruding on private moments. The characters recline, or move like dancers, they turn their head so their gaze never falls upon us. “Pax Romana” (11th of November – 23rd of December 2016) by Juliette Mahieux Bartoli at Kristin Hjellegjerde presents an exploration of hybrid or amalgamated identity, of a 21st century state of mind, with roots in our collective history. For, while these protagonists are spliced, diced, cut up and blotted out, it is in this very fragmentation that the artist finds unity.

The Pax Romana marked a 200-year peace that existed in Europe under the Roman Empire. Ancient Rome was responsible for much of the cross-fertilisation of cultures, languages and peoples in the Ancient World. Fast forward a couple of thousand years and while much has changed, we face many of the same issues as globalisation creates an ever-larger melting pot. Working by combining Renaissance painting techniques with abstract geometry, Mahieux creates fragmented figures designed to reflect individuals who are made up of multiple cultural facets while remaining a coherent whole. She argues that this is ubiquitous to 21st century life, where few people are truly culturally singular.

As such, while splintered, the characters in Mahieux’s paintings are unified in their multiple facets, a compound of awkwardly harmonious limbs and heads and gaps. They form a single intelligent entity moving within a universe of flat, bright colour. Mahieux imbues these characters with a sense of confidence, strength and purpose. She explores the flat geometry of fragmentation, using drapery as a compositional device which, for the artist, bridges elements of abstraction and representation. She uses these sharp-edged pieces of drapery to create contrast, drawing attention to their tactile sensuality and keeping a focus on their colour and form.

Mahieux's making process seeks to reflect the complexity of 21st century existence. She photographs herself while playing – in a return to child-like make-believe, and these accidental poses reveal archetypal gestures. This process reflects the way in which cultures exist both within and without us. “When we are children we are unaware of the broader constructs and events around us: history, politics, literature and art,” Mahieux explains. “Yet they influence the narratives we play out because they are our context.” She then chooses, combines, and cuts these images into a composition. This is then executed in oil paint, using an aesthetic language infused with the Italian Renaissance. To illustrate the cultural diversity of each character, they are each given a first and a last name. The first is after a figure from Greek or Roman mythology which echoes their personality – a proto-name, a paradigm, as it were, harking back to some of the earliest roots of civilization and mythology. The last name is the colour of the background. Mahieux wishes the last name to be translated when the pieces are shown or spoken about in other languages, but the first to remain: Eos Red can become Eos Rosso or Eos Rouge, for example, reflecting the adaptable nature of identity: parts of us change, parts remain the same.

Mahieux explores the nuances and subtleties of cultural difference, and the subconscious and conscious moments integral to the formation of our selves. We are like sponges, she argues, absorbing influences from a young age – and in the case of displacement, incorporating multiple cultures. The way in which these figures are delicately spliced together reflects the eclectic nature of so many people’s identities. We live in a global world, where centuries of travel, exchange, conflict and migration have shaped new, rich and diverse identities – where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

‘Pax Romana’ runs from 11th of November – 23rd of December 2016 at Kristin Hjellegjerde

Information for journalists:

About Juliette Mahieux Bartoli
Juliette Mahieux Bartoli is a French-Italian artist born in the United States. She grew up between Washington DC, Paris, Geneva, and Rome. Mahieux Bartoli attended classes at the Prince's Drawing School, from where she went on to complete an MA in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School in 2012, as well as a BA (Hons) in History of Art and an MA (Cantab) from the University of Cambridge in 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include Mise en Abîme, Art Bermondsey, London (2014), while group shows include Made, Chance Gallery, London and Four Seasons, Kristin Hjellegjerde, London (both 2013). She currently lives and works in London.

About Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery
Kristin Hjellegjerde opened her gallery in south west London in June 2012 following her move from New York. Named one of the top 500 most influential galleries in the world by Blouin (2015), as well as independent gallery of the year by the Londonist (2014), Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery showcases cutting-edge contemporary art from emerging and established international artists, with the central concern being to create an intimate space in which artists can present a coherent body of work within a focused environment. Drawing on her own international background, Kristin Hjellegjerde seeks to discover and develop new talents by creating a platform through which they can be introduced to local and international audiences and by allowing for artistic exchange. Kristin Hjellegjerde also acts as an art advisor for both emerging private and corporate collectors. For more information, visit www.kristinhjellegjerde.com.

For further information and high-resolution images, please contact the gallery on info@kristinhjellegjerde.com

"Everything has a face. Everything has eyes. Everything takes a shape. Everything acts as a frame. Everything is a window. Everything shows you the world. Everything shows you itself. Everything reveals something.” (an extract of Ali Smith's writing for 'Facciate/Facades')

Guido Guidi was born in Cesena, in 1941, and studied architecture in Venice at the beginning of the sixties. Influenced by Neorealist film and Conceptual art, he began exploring how people have altered the natural landscape of Italy. His work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Centre Georges Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum, MAXXI Rome and most recently at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris.

Breather brings together five artists whose work addresses the liminal space that exists between two actions, as thoughts are processed, events connected and a work of art makes the transition from a verb to a noun. Presenting works by Alex Olson, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Sarah Dobai, Brie Ruais and Simone Forti, the exhibition aims to explore this moment of mid-transition through a variety of media, including photography, ceramics, painting and film.

This instant manifests itself in the blink between eyes open/eyes closed and the activation of the ‘mind’s eye’ in the case of Alex Olson. In her diptych she paints the right hand canvas blindly from her memory of the left, veiling and unveiling her vision as she moves between the two. This effort to “see” the same mark from a trace left on the underside of her eyelid acts as a report back from looking inside. In fact, the three paintings on display (all made this year), present a concern for the relationship between the eye and the brain in the intake of physical and semiotic information. In Chart I a textured geometry competes and collaborates for attention with its shadowed counterpart below. Similarly in Return a rectangular shape emerges above, casting light into the spectre of a shape beneath. By switching silhouettes and surfaces in this way, Olson alludes to the ambiguous line that exists between sight and insight as it transitions from material to metaphysical implication.

Alexi-Meskhishvili likewise plays with perception in her photographs, countering the intimacy of the close-up with the distancing devices offered by digital manipulation. By combining digital and analogue technology, the artist alludes to the possibility of a space beyond the flat surface, as she de-contextualises her pictures through the process of layering. Comprised of found images, reworked images and the original negatives themselves, her photographs take on a sculptural quality; they operate between abstraction and reality, in a transitory space that hints at a narrative, but refuses to unfold. Whilst lights and colours serve to abstract and disorientate the compositions, traces of life (flowers and hair) pull reality back in.

In the photographs from Sarah Dobai’s series The Overcoat, the artist explores material desire and the self-reflexive nature of photography as a medium. Taken on a large-format analogue camera and inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, her photographs portray commercial vitrines in London and Paris, all named after the streets and areas (Bond Street, Mile End, Hatton Gardens) that compose them. Principally un-peopled, the photographs consider the displays as a form of vernacular picture making, with the glassed in rectangle of the vitrines referring back to the photographic process itself and the capture of transient reflections connecting subject to medium. As with Alexi-Meskhishvili’s works, Dobai’s choice of windows and approach to photographing them play with the viewer’s perception of surface and depth.

Brie Ruais likewise functions on this threshold, as her works operate on the nexus between ceramics and conceptual art, and embody the transition from action to outcome. In order to make these works, Ruais first sets herself a list of limitations that determine the weight of the clay (often equal to her own bodyweight), the action, the time, and the basic shape, and then confronts the material with her body in a highly physical process, that involves kneeling, kicking, spreading, scraping, skimming…. The resultant ceramics trace the act that brought them into being, with the ephemeral moment forever caught in clay. The works are then cut into tiles, glazed and fired, and titled in a way that describes both method and aesthetic (Spreading Outward from Copper Center). The glazing process operates on a further frontier, bringing the works back to life by colouring them in.

Finally, in Simone Forti’s collaboration with the film-maker Hollis Frampton, Cloths, this instant is given a temporal quality through the choreographed creation and documentation of suspense. For this performance, filmed in 1967, layers of material were flung over a rectangular frame by an invisible puppeteer, in a sequence both comic and hypnotic. This abrupt motion, along with the clumsy splicing together of takes, and flecks of dust puzzling on the surface of the film deny any attempt at a smooth transition, further emphasising the length of the pause between. The simplicity of the gesture captivates the viewer on the cusp of impatience as the new layer cancels out the cloth before it, shifting the colour, pattern and texture of each subsequent view.

Breather thus unites these artists in that illusory moment of disorientation that exists when works are performed into being.

For the publication The Overcoat, 2015, Dobai was commissioned to produce a new series of works to accompany the re-publication of Russian author Nicolai Gogol’s story The Overcoat (1842), published by Four Corners Books London. In 2016 the bookwork The Copyist was released and published by Everyday Press.

Brie Ruais (b. 1982, Southern California), lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2011.

Forti is a key figure of 1960s minimalist dance, examining the relationship of space and the body. She emigrated to the US with her family in 1939. In 1955, Forti started dancing with Anna Halprin, a pioneer in improvisation and working with kinesthetic awareness. In 1959, she moved to New York to study composition at Merce Cunningham Studio with musicologist and dance educator Robert Dunn, where she met and began to work informally with choreographers Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton.

Forti collaborated with artists and composers, including Robert Morris, La Monte Young, Yoko Ono, Robert Whitman, Charlemagne Palestine and Peter Van Riper. In the early 1980s Forti started speaking while moving, working with newspapers and doing solo performances called “News Animations,” giving expression to images, memories and speculations sparked by the news media. Forti has published several books, among them Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Press, Halifax 1974) and Oh, Tongue!, edited and published by Fred Dewey (Beyond Baroque Books, Los Angeles 2003). Her works and performances were presented in exhibitions and museums in the US and internationally, most recently at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art New York, Guggenheim Museum, Sao Paulo Biennale and Louvre Paris.

Foot-Kroku-Zvuk-Klingen-Fall - the corruption of ‘footfall’ through translation from English, to Czech, to German places an emphasis on the motion and the sound of the action implied by the word Footfall. The collective JocJonJosch are devising a new performance entitled Footfall premiering at Laure Genillard Gallery on the opening night, lending its name to the exhibition and thus defining its parameters Footfall.

The exhibition is curated by Jo Melvin.

JocJonJosch is the European collaborative practice of three artists; Jonathan Brantschen, Joschi Herczeg and Jocelyn Marchington, based in Switzerland and England. Together they explore the difficulties and joys inherent in group and individual decision-making processes. Their seemingly repetitive and futile interactions slip between notions of humour, pain and the serio-comic.

Imagist constructions in poetry function similarly to the transience associated with a footfall. The word acts on our sensibilities to conjure with imaginative associations in subversive, straightforward and unexpected ways. We seek parallels. This process points out how memory operates, through sensory association, a touch of the hand, an aroma or a smell: when particularities can vaunt and compress time’s duration.

The activity of digging has formed a core part of the production of JocJonJosch’s work. This is the repetitive motion and the physical act of digging, making a hole and piling the soil. Questions of what to do with the displaced earth and where to put it are confronted; use it to re-fill the hole, or to make bricks which form a tower of mud. The hole in the ground indicates a kind of memorial while the tower is an inevitably disintegrating edifice.

Foot-Kroku-Zvuk-Klingen-Fall will present recent works by JocJonJosh. The performance will take place on three occasions:

Private view on 25 November 2016
Thursday 16 December
Friday 3 February 2017

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

― George Orwell

Man is the cruelest animal.

― Friedrich Nietzsche

Why have animals not been subject of greater interest in contemporary conversations and historical discourses in the arts? With this question as a premise, ANIMALITY examines how an artistic and theoretical impetus might be formed that challenges the way we think about beings that are not of our own species. In its essence, ANIMALITY asks what we as human beings can learn about ourselves when looking at the limitations of our own thinking, with respect to nonhuman animals. The exhibition leads us to reflect on the importance of addressing ethical issues, thinking beyond our own cultures, and questioning accepted assumptions of who we are. ANIMALITY proposes that while some distinctions between humans and animals are valid, the two groups are more productively conceived as parts of an ontological whole. The exhibition unfolds around six themes— Crossings, Extinction, Markings, Origins, Traces and Variations—each introduced by a short wall text guiding the visitor.

ANIMALITY participates in a broader philosophical debate of the past two centuries that includes such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, who has a particular importance to this exhibition. In his groundbreaking 1964 book ‘Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason’, Foucault connects the idea of human madness with that of animalism. He describes how terms such as ‘wild beasts’, ‘untamed, and ‘frenzied’ have been applied not only to those actually suffering from mental illness, but also to humans from exotic places and cultures that, in the eyes of colonizers, had chosen to live like animals and thus were treated accordingly. ANIMALTY explores clear parallels between Foucault’s idea and our contemporary realities of refugees and immigrants, expanding the dialogue to the larger social and political issues of our time. Contemporary and historical artworks as well as numerous artifacts are juxtaposed, allowing for relationships between art and non-art materials to emerge, creating strong and provocative links between historical and contemporary realities.

The display of the exhibition follows the layout of the zoo. Over the last 150 years, zoos have developed completely new display strategies to simulate animals’ natural habitats and retire as inhumane the old-fashioned cage. The layout of ANIMALITY examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at how zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections, contrasting the idea of museum with that of a zoo. Indeed, both zoos and museums are concrete expressions of long-standing tensions between wildness and civilization. In their efforts to promote an appreciation of art and nature, both museums and zoos reveal much about how our culture envisions the world and humanity’s place in it.

Jens Hoffmann is a writer and exhibition maker. He currently is Director of Special Exhibitions and Public Programs at The Jewish Museum, New York, Co-Artistic Director of FRONT International: Cleveland Exhibition of Contemporary Art and Senior Curator at the MOCA Detroit.

A fully illustrated catalogue designed by A Practice for Everyday Life will accompany this exhibition. To commemorate ANIMALITY, Marian Goodman Gallery will sell a limited edition print by George Shiras.

Following a solo exhibition of portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in 2014, Catherine Goodman showcases new larger landscapes and figures at Marlborough Fine Art.

Taking its title from the opening lines of Rilke’s poem, The Last House, the exhibition juxtaposes portraits of people, animals and objects alongside large-scale landscapes, revealing different facets of Goodman’s creative imagination and its rich range of references drawn from life and art.

Some of the images from the National Portrait Gallery exhibition reappear – including Harry Parker, soldier, Afghanistan veteran, and acclaimed novelist – in a much less literal work titled Wayfarer, painted in gestural oranges and reds.

Moving freely between different genres, this exhibition reveals the scope of Goodman’s imaginative life and the ways in which she harnesses memory and narrative in her response to the world as a painter.

The diverse landscapes of Tuscany and the Himalayan mountains in India where she has painted for many years, continue to feed her recent works. Huts, palapas, and poplar trees become powerful presences in scenes where a sense of spatial ambiguity often makes the landscape seem unfamiliar. Typically painted from life on un-stretched canvas, her works are layered with imagined scenes and memories in the studio, without losing the immediacy of her original encounter with the subject.

Drawing has always been a fundamental component of Goodman’s practice, pursued alongside and invigorating her painting. Included in the exhibition are several works on paper created with pastels and paint sticks. Their subject matter and dynamic expressivity is closely connected to the larger canvases where she uses oil paint applied in bold brush strokes overlaid with animating skeins of colour.

As the Artistic Director of the Royal Drawing School, which she founded with HRH The Prince of Wales in 2000, Goodman is an advocate for the importance of drawing, and continues to assert its relevance in contemporary practice through her work and teaching.

Deeply engaged with the history of art, she has spent every Saturday for the last six years drawing from Old Master paintings in The National Gallery, including Veronese, Titian, and Michelangelo.

A fully illustrated catalogue will be published to coincide with this exhibition. Hannah Rothschild, filmmaker, writer and Chairman of the National Gallery, and Andrea Rose, former Director of Visual Arts at the British Council, will both contribute essays to the catalogue; the exhibition will also be curated by Andrea Rose in partnership with Geoffrey Parton of Marlborough Fine Art.

narrative projects is pleased to present Shadows for Construction, a first solo exhibition at the gallery by Amsterdam-based Greek artist Antonis Pittas.

Pittas’ practice is based around context-sensitive spatial installations and objects, which are informed by architecture, politics, art-historical references, the performative aspects of installation art and its social dynamics. The majority of his projects come into existence over a long period of time, and always in relation to a particular site or context. In the course of his career, Pittas has become increasingly intrigued by the question of how past and present relate to and reinforce each other, and how public memories can be captured in the making.

October Gallery, London is excited to announce reMembering, an exhibition of new works by Sylvie Franquet. The artist’s first solo presentation will run from 1st December to 28th January. A private view will be held on 30th November.

Sylvie Franquet is a discovery. Born in Belgium, she read Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ghent and Cairo universities. Much of her life has been spent immersed in the Mediterranean world, reading, travelling widely throughout the region, and writing extensively on Middle Eastern culture. Out of this has come the unique artistic voice in reMembering, which layers word and image, ancient myth and everyday life, in textile, tapestries, collage and embroidered cloth dolls.

Franquet reworks found tapestries, showing a preference for those based on canonical works of art. She overlays these with further images and with found words from poets and thinkers, and text messages from friends. She cites Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone da Pensiere, with its dense collation of thoughts, ephemera and philosophies, as influencing her approach. The laborious process of unpicking, repairing and reworking can take months, resulting in a metamorphosis achieved by the magic power of the needle.

Needlepoint has for centuries been seen as the domain of the female. Franquet is fascinated by this inheritance: the needlepoints she finds are based on paintings by men, who until recently had a monopoly on the visual depiction of women. Those images were then reinforced by women sewing, and are now transformed by her needle. This complex history of gendered production and reaction is a central concern of Franquet’s work: reMembering questions attitudes surrounding gender and social and creative status. An electric aesthetic reminiscent of punk imbues the stitching with the look of pixels. Franquet uses rhizomatic layering of texts and languages that, in her hands, take on the nature of rebellious graffiti and radical twitter feeds.

The Poupées (mannequins) develop this theme: Franquet sews life-size fabric sculptures, pattern-cut from her own body and tattooed in a similar graffiti to the tapestries. These remembered/reconstructed female bodies function as repositories of memory, stories and myth. Alongside these figures hang a battalion of Wayward Sisters, small cloth dolls chattering with overstitched words of wisdom.

Franquet’s work has been featured in Vogue and Elle, and her art was included in the critically-acclaimed exhibition More Material, curated by Duro Olowu at Salon 94 in New York. She also participated in the 2015 Féminin Pluriel exhibition at Fondation Dar Bellarj in Marrakech. The October Gallery exhibition will be her first major presentation, and the first public showing of the Poupées and The Wayward Sisters.